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And how does the House get such a bill past the Senate, and Obama to become federal law?

Colorado passed a marijuana referendum (so did Washington). This is a serious liberal issue, and the problem is even though it's legal now in Colorado for recreational use, the Feds can still come in and bust you. Republicans can use this to push a bipartisan state's rights bill (and we can use the same state's rights to nullify Obamacare at the state level). If the Democrats want to be the party of screwing liberals in Colorado and Washington right after the election, let them.

Your right that one could use it to try and get a states rights bill passed. But the Dims are going to see it coming a mile away with how it could affect their Health care mandate. They would be more incline to do a pot bill then a states rights bill.

Your right that one could use it to try and get a states rights bill passed. But the Dims are going to see it coming a mile away with how it could affect their Health care mandate. They would be more incline to do a pot bill then a states rights bill.

Yeah, but House Majority is a big bargaining chip. I'm just saying, it's not like Republicans are out of options.

I honestly don't know why some people are so upset by this. Mark Levin thinks it's the end of the world, but then he has comprehensive health care and you are paying for it.

One more time folks:

 We are already spending more on health care per person than any country which has a single payer system

Resulting in better quality of care than any country with a single payer system. You always leave that part out. Our cancer survival rates are higher than any other country's, our wait times for treatment are shorter, and the most telling proof, the number of people from those countries to leave them to get the care that their single payer systems cannot or will not provide.

Originally Posted by Novaheart

 Insurance companies skim money off the top of the health care delivery system. Health insurance was not invented by these people.

What does that even mean?

Originally Posted by Novaheart

 Having private health insurance will not get you better care. You are as likely to be sharing a hospital room with a vagrant as you would a peer. It will not get you preferred service at the ER, those decisions are made on the basis of urgency.

The latter is true, but irrelevant. The former is false.

Originally Posted by Novaheart

 Not having health insurance is not freedom for either you or the public. You are a financial bomb waiting to go off which can take your business or everything you own, and the public will get stuck with the check one way or another.

You are only a financial bomb if you accept the premise that the state owes you medical care. It doesn't. The issue is not whether you should or shouldn't be free to not have insurance, it's whether the rest of us should be compelled to take up the slack for you if you don't. Eliminate the mandate to provide medical care for those who have the means to buy insurance but choose not to, and they will either buy the insurance or assume the risk.

Originally Posted by Novaheart

 This is not "taking" or stealing, commandeering or whatever buzzword you prefer "1/7th of the economy". Health insurance is not 1/7th of the economy, health care is and that is an issue unto itself. No, we're not talking about government taking over health care, we're talking about government taking over health care payment mechanism.

This is, in fact, taking control of 1/7 of the economy, since the Federal Government is assuming control of all medical decisions made.

Originally Posted by Novaheart

 NONE, absolutely NO ASPECT of health care is completely private:

- Doctors, nurses, researchers, and everyone associated with this industry have their educations subsidized by the taxpayers in the US or country of origin.

- Research facilities are government funded. The pharmaceutical companies do not invent serious drugs. Pharmaceutical companies invent penis stiffy drugs and hair replacement tonics, universities and NIH invent the big gun drugs of immunology and oncology as well as all of the drugs for "orphan diseases" which only affect a few people who still happen to be people we love.

- Every hospital, public or private, gets an institutional exemption from property taxes.

 We, the public and consumer of health care, allow ourselves to be guinea pigs to train medical personnel in hospitals and to test new drugs and procedures. We are not paid for this, in fact we pay to have this done to us. When you get you hair cut by a student you get a discount, when you let a student stick a needle in your arm you get charged full freight.

Examples: The functional MRI machine was patented at University of Illinois based on incremental technologies developed at Harvard, The USSR, and SUNY.

The CAT Scanner, invented by Robert Ledley at Georgetown (a subsidized university) was just part of his amazing career, a great deal of which was directly government funded.

AZT was first synthesized and developed at universities under an NIH grant as well as at the publicly funded Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Fφrderung der Wissenschaften.

In other words, because we have been suckered into federal involvement in the healthcare industry, we must now allow it more control?

None of your points address the real issues. Healthcare costs have risen, but not because of insurance companies. The real reasons:

Consumers do not pay for the services that they contract. People who pay for services with their own money seek out the best bargains. People who spend other people's money have no incentive to economize. They accept more services than they need, because they are not out of pocket. This is especially true of illegal immigrants. Which leads us to...

Illegal immigrants suck down medical services, but pay nothing for them, not even Medicare or Medicaid taxes. Border states are footing the bill for these services, and they are forced to do so by the federal government.

Government mandates on insurers force them to provide coverage for conditions whether the consumer wants them or not. This drives up the cost of insurance.

Malpractice suits force doctors to engage in practices which do not benefit patients, but which protect them from legal reprisal. They order unnecessary tests, and act in view of how a jury will view their actions.

The solutions for these problems are very simple:

Employer coverage occurs because the tax code doesn't treat medical benefits as income, while permitting employers to deduct the cost as a business expense. This results in people seeing health care as something to be provided, rather than something that they pay for. It also has an impact on portability. The fix is to gradually phase out the tax incentives for employers to provide healthcare, and to treat it as income. Thus, if I want to keep more of my income, I have to shop around for a better plan than my boss provides.

Too easy. What part of illegal do the courts not understand? If you are here illegally, you don't have the right to demand services from those of us who aren't. That includes medical care, welfare, food stamps or any of the other things that liberals demand that we shower illegals with. This will save billions.

Remove the mandates and allow consumers to tailor their plans to their needs. A twenty-year-old needs catastrophic coverage, while an older person might want something more comprehensive. Make insurance as responsive to individual preferences as cable TV, and you reduce the costs. Also, allow out of state purchases of insurance.

Restrict awards in malpractice cases to actual damages and treatment costs, and ensure that the damages are used for treatment (Terry Schiavo's husband blew through her settlement and then sought to get the courts to kill her for him). This would also eliminate contingency fees, since the awards would not exceed damages. Attorneys would either be paid for their services the way that they are in other cases, or they can work pro-bono if they are genuinely committed to the case.

Originally Posted by Novaheart

Why are you people so up in arms? Be specific.

These answers will not be considered serious:

But they are serious. Just because you don't like them doesn't make the unserious. Instead, you are simply trying to redefine the debate in order to prevent arguments that you cannot answer. Let's begin:

Originally Posted by Novaheart

*Because it's socialism

You are advocating socializing the cost of healthcare across the entire tax base. If that isn't socialism, what is? And, because it is socialism, it will be doomed to fail. Pretending that health care is free doesn't make it so.

Originally Posted by Novaheart

 Because there will be death panels

And yet, there will be panels who decide who does and who does not warrant the expenditure of health care funds. Call them what you will, but they will have the power of life and death over people. Calling them Life Panels seems rather Orwellian. What do you prefer to call them?

Originally Posted by Novaheart

 Because there will be rationing

There are two ways to restrict the use of a commodity. One is the price. When it rises, it mitigates demand. If you artificially restrict the price, the other option is rationing. Since you are demanding that prices must be kept low, rationing is inevitable.

Originally Posted by Novaheart

 Because government doesn't do anything right

The government does some things right, but those things entail the use of coercion or force. Your relationship with your doctor is neither coercive nor violent, but with the power of government forcing him to provide care whether he gets paid or not, it becomes coercive. How effective will your doctor be when he must treat you, regardless of how long his shifts are, or how little he is paid?

Originally Posted by Novaheart

 Any of the BS mantras from talk radio

So, you'd rather give us the BS mantras of the MSM?

Originally Posted by Novaheart

IN your own words, what do you think is going to happen?

In my own words, we will go the way of Britain. There will be rationing, because you cannot restrict the price of something as long as demand is constant, without having some means of restricting consumption. That's rationing. There will be death panels, because when you ration healthcare, someone must decide who warrants the expenditure. There will be declines in quality and quantity of healthcare, and there will be a drain as doctors leave the system. The best will leave, the worst will remain, and the system will fail, slowly, but obviously. In an attempt to stem that failure, the government will raise taxes in order to spend more on it, but this will only make things more expensive, without solving the problems. In short, what you advocate will raise costs, reduce quality of care, increase waiting times for critical treatment and ultimately reduce medical decisions to cost/benefits calculations by third parties of bureaucrats. These are my own words, not Mark Levin's or Rush Limbaugh's, but you will dismiss them, as you do any other argument. It doesn't matter, since Obama's reelection guarantees that you will have your way, but at least allow me the right to point out when it is failing.

Yesterday, Diane Sawyer asked John Boehner in an interview if he planned to push for repeal of Obamacare. He responded that “the election changes that” and “Obamacare is the law of the land.”

No, Mr. Boehner, the Constitution is the law of the Republic.

In April 2011, following the failure of Republicans to defund Obamacare during the first budget battle, I wrote the following at Red State:

If it is reckless to shut down the government over Obamacare, then there is nothing in the budget worth fighting for. Due to the degree of entrenchment of the existing entitlement, even Paul Ryan’s plan will not balance the budget for another 26 years. If Obamacare is not defunded within the next year, it will be virtually impossible to completely repeal and will make a balanced budget an impossibility.

Well, they said all along that we’d wait until 2012. They were sure we’d win the election. Ironically, by running away from the Obamacare issue, they ensured that we would not win the election. Now that they lost, they say tough luck on Obamacare.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking: “if we create gridlock over Obamacare, we will…..” We will what? We will risk political reprisal? Then what are we fighting for in the first place? If we are unwilling to fight the implementation of a 4th entitlement program, how will we ever have the moxie to fix the existing ones? >>> Every intervention, program, and mandate prescribed under the 2010 healthcare law, if left intact, will limit freedom, increase insurance premiums, create more dependency, and lead to rationed care.

>>> Aside for the policy disasters that will arise from the beast of Obamacare, the permanent implementation of Obamacare will create enough new dependency across all demographics that we will never be able to win an election anyway.

This is it, folks. If we are unwilling to engage in a fight to the death of Obamacare, there is nothing worth fighting for. And frankly, there will be nothing to fight for.

Boehner, the coward of DC county. The dems to their credit, nominate FIGHTERS to be their leaders. Whack jobs yes, but fighters. We on the other hand seem to nominate men with a high estrogen count. He's the perfect blathering wretch for the radical left with an R after his name. Talk about a historical coincidence. It just couldnt come at a worse time.

Boehner, the coward of DC county. The dems to their credit, nominate FIGHTERS to be their leaders. Whack jobs yes, but fighters. We on the other hand seem to nominate those with a high estrogen count. He's the perfect blathering wretch for the radical left with an R after his name. Talk about a historical coincidence.

Like Flagator says, there are no coincidences, I really don't know how to put a logical purpose to all this other than we may be being punished but I'm really kind of skeptical of that being the reason.

The difference between pigs and people is that when they tell you you're cured it isn't a good thing.

I picked the first two results which seemed to have a good chart and information, not simply ones which I think support my case. As it happens, they are two sources which one might consider politically apart. In one, you see only the chart for colorectal cancer in women, but it shows that the top five is close, and the US and Canada are neck and neck. Now, I will allow that even a neck and neck between the US and Canada is a win for the US because our American demographics include two large populations which are notoriously uninsured, unhealthy, and short lived which Canada doesn't have on nearly the same scale.

The point being, that the top five countries are very close in such comparisons and the other four countries have universal or single payer systems. If indeed our way of doing it (which you have to also allow includes a great deal of government health care already in the aged, the military, the poor, etc..)_ were so vastly superior then you would expect our "win" to be by a greater margin.

Originally Posted by Odysseus

our wait times for treatment are shorter ...

This is a story that the anti-healthcare people like to tell. Our wait times are shorter for on demand services for non-acute conditions. In Canada and the UK (the two most often trotted out by the right wing) the wait time for critical care is no longer than it is in the US.

Originally Posted by Odysseus

.....and the most telling proof, the number of people from those countries to leave them to get the care that their single payer systems cannot or will not provide.

I thought you were better educated on the subject than to say this. Every year, some right wing publication trots out examples of Canadians coming to the US for treatment. In most of those cases, it's geographic. In most cases it's because East Icicle Saskatchewan is closer to some US border city's trauma center than it is to the provincial regional medical center. By the same token, when some millionaire in the US goes to Los Angeles to get an operation you would conclude that New York can't or won't provide the service. Medical care is an emotional thing for some people. How many times have you heard a relative say, "He's got one of the best cardiologists in the country." Now do you honestly think that one of the best cardiologists in the country just decided to go work for some obscure hospital in Podunk Texas? Of course not, but it makes Ma feel better to think so. Population density is not a measure of the quality of healthcare available.